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FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

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Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#271

Post by wayoutthere »

saagarjha wrote: post #242
simias wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my system of value (which is of course subjective and you may not share) I do consider that these open source projects suffer a sort of tragedy of the commons where some companies benefit immensely from them (think how expensive it would be to build and maintain something like osxfuse from scratch) but don't contribute anything back to it. It's like big corporations managing to pay little to no taxes in the countr…

> think how expensive it would be to build and maintain something like osxfuse from scratch Google did both for a while.

Yeah, but they're Google. Their business model is lighting piles of cash on fire, then advertising to the crowd that shows up to watch the pile of burning money.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#272

Post by nicky0 »

marktangotango wrote: post #266
simias wrote: post #201

I agree that any aggressive towards the maintainer is unwarranted, even if I personally disagree with his move. In particular this comment quoted in TFA amused me: >Then drop it and let someone else maintain it. I want to reply to this person: then fork the last open source version and maintain that. That's the whole point really. Besides he apparently made the change two years ago and people only start noticing now,…

> then fork the last open source version and maintain that. But the current maintainer has the Apple provided signing cert, that's the whip hand in this whole deal. I personally don't blame this fellow and in fact apluad him. To many companies exploit OSS maintainers. I think it's great to see someone turn it around for once.

Then they have to get a new signing cert for the forked project.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#273

Post by wayoutthere »

pjmlp wrote: post #69
hizanberg wrote: post #23

Likely the best outcome for the project barring company sponsorship that pays him to continue working on it as OSS. He's been the sole maintainer on the project since 2012 [1] and has never been compensated for it, he says it will always be free to end users but wants companies that are financially benefiting from it to help sponsor continued development [2]: > I will never ask end users for financial support. FUSE w…

This will keep going on, until FOSS community accepts that beyond university projects, someone pumping up their CVs, having a company sponsorship, or being able to pimp it up with some kind of subscription/consulting, there is little to no money to be made and everyone has bills to pay.

Absolutely -- sustainability requires there to be money involved.

Honestly, the only model that seems to work in the long-term is corporate-backed OSS where maintainers are paid a salary. Professionalism endures long after the passion has faded.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#274

Post by lambda »

hizanberg wrote: post #23

Likely the best outcome for the project barring company sponsorship that pays him to continue working on it as OSS. He's been the sole maintainer on the project since 2012 [1] and has never been compensated for it, he says it will always be free to end users but wants companies that are financially benefiting from it to help sponsor continued development [2]: > I will never ask end users for financial support. FUSE w…

> He's been the sole maintainer on the project since 2012 [1] and has never been compensated for it

I have to object to that. I work for a company which pays him to build branded versions of FUSE for macOS, and has been doing so for several years.

He does reliably ship us new builds, but it has sometimes been a little difficult to get him to respond to feature requests or even patches that we send him.

I don't believe that he is scaling much better with his commercial licensing than he was as a FLOSS maintainer.

As it is, we're fairly happy with his work to continue to support new versions of macOS, which is fairly hard to ship systems software on these days (the code signing and notarization requirements keep getting more and more onerous, system integrity protection keeps getting in the way of debugging, and so on), but it would be nice if we weren't limited to a single person working on the project.

I'd really rather he kept the project open source, and continued to provide custom builds for companies on a contract basis. Due to the difficulties of building and signing the kernel extension across all of the versions of macOS that it supports, just having the source available but keeping the binaries under a proprietary license would probably be sufficient to make it worth the while of most companies to license with him to provide custom builds like we do.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#275

Post by nicky0 »

toadkicker wrote: post #269
earonesty wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Small companies don't have the resources"... that's some backward thinking right there. By failing to contribute, small companies cost themselves money very quickly. How can a small business afford to live in a world of un-maintainable forks, patches and tech debt? Only large companies can afford to maintain private forks of FOSS. Small companies have to give back, or they will simply disappear.

I can't count how many times I've submitted a patch only to hear my supervisors complain that I made a contribution to the thing that makes the business profitable.

I know you are deploying irony but due to competing interpretations I can't figure out its intent. Do you mean the supervisors do complain or they don't?

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#276

Post by linuxftw »

72deluxe wrote: post #253
MayeulC wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm starting to feel that September is slowing and it might end at some point, that in the end it really is related to the technology adoption life cycle[1]. If you look at the bell curve on that page, its integral is the technology penetration, that is a sigmoid: start slowly (initial period), accelerate (eternal september) for a while, and start to decrease the penetration speed. At some point, enough people will l…

Are you sure? I am certain it's accelerating. More and more people use the Internet for their daily life and more and more services are "going digital". I know some 16 year olds (born 2003, after XP how depressing, I feel old) and the concept of NOT having the Internet and dirt cheap music streaming etc. is completely alien to them. They also have no concept of privacy and will install every service known to man on t…

They are using the internet, but they're no longer internet citizens. They don't have any understanding of how it works (even on a basic level), and are being walled off into proprietary apps like cattle.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#277

Post by wayoutthere »

__d wrote: post #195
DagAgren wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure the argument "FOSS has done fine so far" is that convincing when you then lay out many of the places where FOSS has been failing miserably.

Not to forget the many, many places where it has and is succeeding happily. Here's my "get off my lawn" perspective: those developers who remember a world where there was little or no free software (from, say, the mid-1980's, when Sun made the C compiler a for-cost option on SunOS through until commercial Linux distributions), have a visceral understanding of free software that those who came to it later, and (perhap…

> In a healthy community, people pitch in to help, and maintainers become overwhelmed by the scale of activity, not because they've been left alone to support many users by themselves for years.

It's entirely because many of these projects are run by professional software developers, not professional managers. So many projects with single maintainers are that way because the maintainer feels a sense of ownership rather than a sense of stewardship.

It's not to say that solo maintainers are bad people; just that the jobs of writing software and coordinating software development require different, non-overlapping skill sets.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#278

Post by zellyn »

zem wrote: post #126

think of it this way - like all the other companies, he's maintained his own private fork of the open source osxfuse code. his happens to work on catalina, and he's telling those companies that if their forks do not, he's willing to sell them access to his code.

I really like this articulation of the situation.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#279

Post by ghettoimp »

mr__y wrote: post #196
pjc50 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the developers generally understand that. No sensible person goes into FOSS for the money. It's the customers - consuming non-developers - who have a problem of expectations.

>No sensible person goes into FOSS for the money well, going FOSS can be an effective marketing strategy: by making something open and free (in both meanings) you get much higher probability of that something becoming popular. That in turn gives a lot new opportunities to sell complementary something or other something. This is best case scenario though, and you need to have resources/other sources of income for the…

Even without building some kind of product to sell, it's a way to get personal visibility and build your career.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#280

Post by nicky0 »

saagarjha wrote: post #248
DagAgren wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FUSE is generally shipped as a separate executable, which requires no modifications. So no, GPL would have changed nothing. Companies would still have been able to ship it unmodified for free without contributing anything. They could have kept their own code that uses FUSE secret, but even if they had had to release that code, that code is often useless to anyone else. It would not have helped or supported the author…

> They could have kept their own code that uses FUSE secret If they had linked against FUSE they’d need to provide code.

But then they would not have used FUSE.
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